Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

This Summer, the Guilt Is Gratis

Townies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities.

Do you have a minute for gay rights? How about Planned Parenthood? The A.S.P.C.A.? Greenpeace? Save the clock tower?

It’s that season again. Of the many telltale hallmarks of summer in New York City perhaps the most unsung are the sidewalk volunteers. See them stationed there in their matching neon T-shirts, facing each other at either end of the block, requesting your personal information and your money. The world is their foosball table, and you are their teeny-tiny ball.

Most are well-meaning volunteers or college interns looking to thicken their résumés. Many are too young to have heard the Mitch Hedberg line regarding strangers who accost you on the street: “When someone hands you a flier, it’s like saying, ‘Here — you throw this away.'” In any case, these binder-brandishers aren’t really handing out paper; they’re doling out guilt. And that we already have on us as we round the corner.

The use of “Do you have a minute” over, say, “May I speak with you” or a simple “Excuse me” is pure genius. You can try a rueful smile and a shake of the head, or urgently attend to your cellphone, but it’s no use: keep barreling toward these people, and you are putting yourself on the wrong side of history simply because you happened to take a poorly timed trip to the grocery store. All you wanted was some yogurt and juice. Now here you are saying, in effect, that you cannot spare 60 seconds of your cushy life to address other people’s civil liberties. Not only are you a bad person; you’re a bad American. I hope you accidentally bought the yogurt that expires tomorrow, you utter jerk.

If I cared just a little bit more, I’d stomp back and defend myself. As it just so happens, I adopted my pet; I recycle; I live in Chelsea, a few blocks away from a store called the Rainbow Station, which, let me tell you, does not provide parking for rainbows; and I am scheduled to give a talk at a Planned Parenthood luncheon this fall. Do I have a minute for these causes? I have a lifetime for them! I live with them!

Kelsey Dake

Blame my mother, but I was taught not to engage with strangers. So I keep walking, faster and faster. I treat street guilt like scaffolding and just swerve around it, despite knowing that there’s always more around the corner.

But O.K., is the situation really so bad? Are these people any more of a summertime inconvenience than a subway car without air-conditioning or a malodorous city block? Wait: did I just liken unpaid volunteers for good causes to bags of trash? Speaking of bad people, it takes an extreme specimen of one to rant for an extended period of time about unpaid volunteers. So let’s move on. Let’s move on to the soap.

This summer there’s been a real boom on the product giveaway front. Several stores have stationed round-the-clock hipster girls and boys whose mission is to shove tiny soap samples (along with granola, candy and shampoo) in pedestrians’ faces. There is no social issue at stake here, unless you count basic hygiene as a social issue. And they want nothing from you, not your phone number, not your signature, not a donation.

But that doesn’t make it any easier to say no to them. No sooner have I dodged the teenagers with the clipboards than I find myself confronted with a fistful of promotional lollipops. Unlike fliers, these goods actually have value. Yet I can’t get away from them fast enough.

I recognize that it’s not a big deal for someone to give you a lollipop so long as that person isn’t standing in front of an unmarked white van. In the parallel universe known as the rest of the country, free stuff induces no crisis — just the occasional “thank you.”

But when you make your home in the middle of such an urban mess, it can be difficult to differentiate the motivations of one person trying to stop you from another person trying to stop you. In the end, it’s that decision — even the consideration of the attempt to make that decision — that you can’t afford to waste the 60 seconds on. Otherwise you’d never get anywhere.

Besides, what am I going to do with a miniature sliver of soap? Wash one of my arms? I am a bigger person than a little foosball man, if only on the outside.

An excerpt from this column appeared in print on July 3, 2011.

Sloane Crosley is the author, most recently, of the essay collection “How Did You Get This Number.”

What's Next

Townies, a series about life in New York — and occasionally other cities — written by the novelists, journalists and essayists who live there, appears on Thursdays. This week features an essay by Sandy SooHoo, a freelance photographer and writer who is working on a collection of essays.